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On Rothko: I wrote this for my own website back in 2008:
All art is paradox. But Rothko, perhaps more than any other modern painter, embraced the paradox and threw it profoundly in our faces.
The canvas is flat. You can’t enter it. You can’t go through it, if it’s hanging on the wall. At least without injury and perhaps a heavy bill from the gallery. But Rothko continuously tells the audience to do just that. Embrace the painting, enter it, walk into it, let it engulf you and torture you and shake you. Shake the core of you. He wants the painting to be a plane and an entrance way in the same bright moment. Flat and omnipresent. Pressed against the wall as it surrounds you. And he wants you to accept the paradox and reject it long enough to succumb.
“We favor the simple expression of complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”
Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia) in 1903. Rather, Marcus Rothkowitz was born in that place and time. He became Mark Rothko later in life. At the age of 10, he left Russia with part of his family to join the other part in America, arriving at Ellis Island and eventually Portland, Oregon. The culture shock must have been tremendous. From a life filled with the constant threat from Cossacks and the Czar, to one with much more mundane worries. He did, however, have to grow up in a hurry, as his father, Jacob, died not long after their arrival in America. His life from that point on became more and more complex . . .
. . . If one looks only at his most famous paintings, the floating blocks of luminous color, the large canvasses he wants us to enter and celebrate, that person might mistake the surface for stasis, for the lack of evolution and emotion, for a ground that never changed for Rothko. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only did his intellectual rationale for his art evolve greatly over time, taking him from an intense study of myths, archetypes, Jung and Freud to Nietzsche and beyond . . . his artistic methods and subject matter evolved as well. Few artists, in fact, changed as dramatically as Rothko, if we look at his career from the 30s until his suicide in 1970. Another paradox. The flat, solid blocks of color, forever floating, and a whirlwind of change before and after.
“I am not an abstractionist. … I am not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. … I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions. … The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!”
I have sat for many an endless moment in front of his paintings, most recently in Washington D.C. Rather than make me weep, they generally bring me tremendous waves of calm and peace. Even though I’m guessing he wasn’t shooting for that reaction, he never did want to limit them or define them or jail them. Enter the painting was all. Only connect was all.
“Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”
Of course, it’s impossible to sum up a great artist. And rather ridiculous to try. But I think, in a nutshell, Rothko sought something similar to other great modernists like Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Pound, Eliot and Joyce. To reinvent myths, reinvigorate them, and introduce them back into the cultural stream. Most of the great modernists seemed to want this, saw this as vital, essential for our health and survival. Some thought this could be done only through collecting ruins, fragments, the remnant of civilization. They sensed a scattering and a loss of cultural potency that could never be reversed. Others thought the disorder and fragmentation could be overcome. I think Rothko falls into the latter category, and his floating blocks of luminous color contain the detritus of civilizations long gone. Paradoxically, they surround us with the future.
WV makes an excellent point above, one that hit me right after I read your post, bnw.
It’s a major misconception about abstract artists that they do X because they don’t have the “talent” to do Y. Y being, usually, copying nature like a Xerox machine, give or take.
Pretty much every single great painter or sculptor generally called “abstract” worked for years and years to get to that place. They started their training doing “representational” art, copied the masters, copied, perhaps, their teachers, drew, painted, sculpted from “life,” and then decided to go in a different direction. They didn’t do it because they had no other choice. They did it because the artist in them pretty much forced them to. They were driven to express themselves in a different manner, one outside the contemporary box. They did what all great artists do, in all the arts: Add another step on the ladder of human/expressive possibilities. Build upon the past and carve out their own place in the progression. Add their name to the legacy of the new, built upon the old.
Also: in reality, all art is “abstract.” All of it is an abstraction from internal/external “nature.” A vision informed by both, simultaneously. Emphases are generally quite different. But all artists attempt to render their personal vision which comes from within.
IOW, “abstract” artists render their own internal vision, informed by the external and internal. It takes just as much “talent” to do what, say, Kandinsky or Picasso did, as opposed to, say, Raphael. The felicity of their expression, their vision, should tell the tale. Not whether or not someone can “copy” things from the external world like a photo — that guy on NPR can do that, and, to me, his stuff isn’t “art.”
To me, in the post-photographic world, the “abstract” is more and more important. If someone wants photographic “realism,” for example, why not just look at photos? Painting and sculpture can give us something photos — with exceptions — can’t generally do: Bring us a direct vision of internal life, connect us with that vision, directly.
The left always gets tagged with much higher standards to live up to. Far, far higher.
If the “outsider” candidate is centrist or right-wing, nuff said. They don’t have to explain anything. But if the outsider candidate is left-wing, honestly left-wing, she is immediately tasked with all kinds of hoops to jump through in order to prove their viability as candidate. “What has she ever done!!”
This is something not asked by supporters of Trump, for instance, who also has never won any elective office.
This is also not a requirement for Ms. Clinton, who, while winning elective office, and publicly supporting all kinds of traditional “progressive” causes — for women, minorities and so on . . . . hasn’t actually done anything to improve the lives of POCs or women.
There are some, in fact, who say it’s quite the opposite. Not sure if you guys already posted this article, for instance:
Waterfield,
To me, it says great things about her that she keeps running as a Green. She could likely have gained “power” early on, as a member of the Democratic Party, but that would have meant chucking her principles and selling out. So few politicians, in either wing of the Duopoly, have ever avoided that. It’s basically a preexisting condition of our system, which now requires nearly a billion to just get nominated, to all but sell out before hand.
In short, I don’t see her lack of political victories as important in the slightest. It’s a badge of honor, in my book. If she were to win from that perch (The Greens), she would have done something that virtually no other president has done, at least in living memory:
Avoided the complete (or close to it) sell-out necessary to win elections via the Duopoly.
Here’s her “about” page:
And if you just go by this little snippet, her “accomplishments” already trump Trump’s:
Jill received several awards for health and environmental protection including: Clean Water Action’s “Not in Anyone’s Backyard” Award, the Children’s Health Hero” Award, and the Toxic Action Center’s Citizen Award. Jill has appeared as an environmental health expert on the Today Show, 20/20, Fox News, and other programs. She also served on the board of directors for Physicians for Social Responsibility.
She is the co-author of two widely-praised reports, In Harm’s Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development, published in 2000, and Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging, published in 2009. The first of these has been translated into four languages and is used worldwide as a community tool in the fight for health and the environment. The reports connect the dots between human health, social justice, a healthy environment and green economies.
Jill was born in Chicago and raised in Highland Park, Illinois. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1973, and from Harvard Medical School in 1979.
The vast majority of movies are not art. They are a commodity. “Troy” is a commodity.
We agree on that. See, WV? More common ground!!
All art is a commodity. It has value, and is traded for things or money or status or prestige or all of the above.
But taste? That can differ. Within a given range, people have different experiences and like different things.
I’m talking about commodity in the capitalist sense. In the Marxist sense of the capitalist sense. No, not all “art” is a commodity. That implies endless exchange, for the sake of exchange, where the exchange itself, where the result of the exchange (money) is the alpha and omega — and not the art. The sole purpose is to make money, etc. etc.
To commodify something is to alter its purpose to fit inside that box. To be the thing that makes money, and nothing more. If it has “use value” beyond the exchange, that’s just a lucky side effect. The raison d’etre for a commodity under capitalism is to make money for the capitalist.
“Art,” at least from my point of view, is something that radically transcends all of that. That exists prior to those particular economic relations, scoffs at them, radically overcomes them, perhaps even embarrasses and shames them, etc.
Real “art,” in fact, in a kind of meta-narrative, demonstrates the shallowness, the emptiness of culture as commodity*. This has always been an essential part of its tradition(s).
*Milan Kundera’s use of the word “kitsch” fits well here.
Zooey was noting how awful the Dem-Rep choice is this time around. But think about it — is it REALLY that different than in past years? Really? Are Trump-the-billiaire-business-man and Clinton-the-insider all that different from the McCains and Kerrys and Bushs and Bill-Clintons and Obamas and Nixons etc? I dunno. I dont think they are that different. Trump has that outsiders ‘talk-radio’ demeanor but is he REALLY worse than GW ?
Perhaps the main difference is just a matter of likability and style. The two current choices are the least likeable (on a personal level) in decades, and their styles annoy the hell out of large numbers of Americans. Prior to his election, Dubya was thought to be very (personally) likeable, for example. Gore wasn’t. Bush won largely on the strength of that, and certainly not his policy ideas. He managed to persuade millions of Democrats to vote for him, instead of Gore, etc. etc.
So, yeah, when it comes to what they actually want to do in office, and will do, it isn’t all that different from the usual. They’ll both protect the ruling class, capitalism itself, the empire, and bomb a lot of people. They’re both “conservatives,” as are pretty much all the eventual nominees from both parties (at least since the 1960s) . . . though Trump has to appeal to people to the right of “conservative” who think of themselves as conservatives still. Clinton doesn’t have that burden. She can be straight up conservative, and still fool most “progressives” along the way.
As Vinnie Barbarino once said, “I’m so confused!”
;>)
We don’t disagree about what artists have done through the years, centuries, millennia. Yes, there is endless recreation, recombining, alteration to go with the creation. That is a part of the deal, the process, the making of art. I think where things went off-track is that I did take your comments as totalizing. They did strike me as “you’re wrong. I’m right. That’s a fact, Jack, and there is no other way to look at this.”
We also use different words to express different things, when it comes to “art,” which is kind of a sacred thing to me. I have no religion. Am an atheist, and a “No gods, no Masters” sorta guy. But “art”? That’s about as close as I get to thinking that there is something “divine” in this world. And, yeah, I’m exaggerating here to make a point.
So when I see the word, I think of genius and the extraordinary and the “original,” to the degree possible. I don’t see all attempts at “art” as being “art.” Most, in fact, fail. And because of that, I can’t give a filmmaker an automatic pass at slicing and dicing source material to his or her heart’s content. It has to actually make sense within the world they depict; it has to actually rise to “art,” in order for me to call it that.
I didn’t see that at all with the movie Troy. I saw it as willful and self-indulgent change for change’s sake, and a far cry from the power of the source material.
Basically, when something is so brilliant already, so self-contained, while sending us into a multitude of other directions, why change it? It’s far more than the old “if it aint broke, don’t fix it,” thing. A gazillion levels beyond that. It’s why mess with virtual perfection (beyond minor variations) at all? Why not just try to bring it, intact, to a new audience — that is a major achievement in and of itself, IMO.
ZN,
Not going by “argument from authority.” Was responding to your insistence that you know what art is, and I supposedly don’t. My first degree was in Art Studio, with a minor in Art History. I know the “history” part too. I also have never stopped studying the history of the humanities in general, and have more than enough credits for a degree in Literature, and an MFA if I want to go back. I was taught music while young, with an emphasis on its history, too. We both have strong backgrounds on the subject. You teach it. I could teach it. And so on.
Again, I don’t think we’re even talking about the same thing here, though I am getting the idea that we disagree on what qualifies as “art.”
Oh, well. This too shall pass.
You really take the cake. Your lack of sincerity and my wasting my time addressing it sure makes me the fool. Have you been living under a rock since Obama was elected?
You’re making it personal, bnw. I’m absolutely sincere in what I’ve written.
Beyond that: you posted one Op Ed, by Elizabeth Price Foley, who works at Cato, and is an advocate for the Tea Party. Just one editorial. That proves nothing. She is also one of the leads in the lawsuit by the House against the ACA.
Come on. Please find articles that have at least a little bit of objectivity to support your claims.
